Comment by simonh
4 years ago
Sun was destroyed by commodity Intel hardware on one side and free open source software (Apache/Linux/GCC, etc) on the other. In the very early 90s Sun workstations and servers could do things x86 boxes couldn’t do. Once that changed they were doomed.
That makes sense.
What were these unique 90s features?
On desktops, Sun workstations had graphics capabilities PCs could only dream of.
Most multi cpu x86 systems were file servers built for parallel I/O. Although it was technically possible to build symmetric multiprocessing x86 systems, and some vendors did so, the PC architecture specifically wasn’t conducive to it, software support was very limited and overall they didn’t work very well. Mostly they were hacky dual cpu systems, meanwhile Sun was selling highly efficient 4 and 8 cpu systems with high bandwidth architectures. The first SMP system I used was a Sparcserver 630MP in 1992. We had some x86 boxes running Xenix but they were pitiful in comparison.
Sun didn’t need to market expansion cards as “plug and play” because how else would they work? On x86 it was a wondrous and largely mythical concept deep into the 90s.
64 bit SPARC systems were available 8 years before x86-64 although that was mid 90s.